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Social issues in the glass castle book jeannette walls
Social issues in the glass castle book jeannette walls
The glass castle abuse from the parents
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“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.” The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about a young girl and her dysfunctional life. Jeannette and her family live a very tough life, constantly leaving to go somewhere new. However, along the way, Jeannette decides she wants to escape her family and move to New York. Throughout her life, she and her sister work on moving to New York to better their lives. The Glass Castle will become a classic because it includes hard times of life, contains lessons from parents, and allows the reader to be inspired by Jeannette's escape plan.
“We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night.” (Walls 19) Jeannette and her family were running from the law. They would never pay the bills on time, and would constantly have to leave, as soon as someone expected money from the Walls family. The first time the did the “skedaddle” was when Jeannette was three years old. She was making hot dogs, on her own and was burned badly. Her parents took her to the hospital, and she was there six weeks before the doctor started asking for money. One night, Rex Walls, her father, picked her up and ran away. Another hard time of life was when Jeanette's mother had a miscarriage. “Mom never seemed upset about Marry Charlene's death...Dad, however, wouldn’t talk about Mary Charlene.” (Walls 28) The family never talks about Mary Charlene but Jeannette believes that is why her father has a drinking problem. “As we fought, they called me poor and ugly and dirty, and it was hard to argue at this point.” (Walls 140) Later on, when the family moves to 93 Little Hobart street, Jeannette is bullied because she can...
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...sually work out in the end. ‘What if they don’t?’ That just means you haven’t come to the end yet.” (Walls 259)
Jeannette started to lose faith in her parents after they could no longer provide for her, and swore that she would make a better life for herself. “I swore to myself that it (her life) would never be like Mom’s…” (Walls 208) Jeannette has the idea to move to New York to escape her parents, and pursue her dream of being a journalist. She decides that her older sister, Lori, will have to escape with her, because Jeannette would never leave Lori alone with her parents. The next day, Jeannette buys a piggy bank to start an “escape fund”. To make money, Lori would draw and paint posters for kids at school and sell them for a dollar fifty. Jeannette would babysit and do other kids homework. She made a dollar per assignment and and babysat for a dollar an hour.
Every day the safety and well-being of many children are threatened by neglect. Each child deserves the comfort of having parents whom provide for their children. Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains the childhood from being born into the hands of parent who neglect their children. Many may argue that children need to grow with their parents; however, the removal of children is necessary if the parents disregard the kid’s needs and cannot provide a stable life for their children.
Jeanette Walls is the picture-perfect illustration of an individual who finds righteousness for herself. She is the protagonist in the book “The Glass Castle”, who has an unfair miserable childhood due to how her parents were. Walls stands out for her determination as she goes out to the real world to seek her own justice, with the ultimate goal of being stable for once, and take responsibility for herself, not for the whole family.
Jeannette and her sister Lori always talked about growing up and escaping to New York City (Walls 222). They dreamt of making it big, unlike their parents. Lori began to see New York as “this glowing, bustling place at the end of a long road where she could become the person she was meant to be” (Walls 222). This idea began to rub off on Jeannette, and she too felt the same way.
Jeannette Walls has lived a life that many of us probably never will, the life of a migrant. The majority of her developmental years were spent moving to new places, sometimes just picking up and skipping town overnight. Frugality was simply a way of life for the Walls. Their homes were not always in perfect condition but they continued with their lives. With a brazen alcoholic and chain-smoker of a father and a mother who is narcissistic and wishes her children were not born so that she could have been a successful artist, Jeannette did a better job of raising herself semi-autonomously than her parents did if they had tried. One thing that did not change through all that time was the love she had for her mother, father, brother and sisters. The message that I received from reading this memoir is that family has a strong bond that will stay strong in the face of adversity.
The novel The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, brings to the surface many of the the struggles and darker aspects of American life through the perspective of a growing girl who is raised in a family with difficulties financially and otherwise. This book is written as a memoir. Jeannette begins as what she remembers as her first memory and fills in important details of her life up to around the present time. She tells stories about her family life that at times can seem to be exaggerated but seemed normal enough to her at the time. Her parents are portrayed to have raised Jeannette and her three siblings in an unconventional manner. She touches on aspects of poverty, family dynamics, alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual abuse from
There are several different social issues presented in Jeannette Wall’s memoir “The Glass Castle.” These issues include neglect – medical and education. unsanitary living conditions, homelessness, unemployment, alcohol abuse, domestic violence. violence, discrimination, mental health issues, physical and sexual abuse, hunger and poverty. Poverty was one of the major key issues addressed in this memoir.
...d to share their deepest and most private moments with their audience members, and this in turn will create a genuine, quality story. When asked if Jeannette Walls has fulfilled the duty given to her by William Faulkner, one should not even come close to hesitating with their response. In The Glass Castle, Walls shares some of the most personal and emotion-evoking moments of her life, and they clearly include the essential characteristics of writing as defined by Faulkner. With the expert use of Walls rhetorical strategy, she makes the reader see, hear, feel, and sense the emotion as if it is occurring firsthand. So, to conclude, Jeannette Walls has most definitely fulfilled Faulkner’s expectations of a writer by crafting a memoir stuffed with superb rhetorical strategies that thoroughly translates the events in Walls’ life to the readers in a very detailed manner.
“I told Lori about my escape fund, the seventy-five dollars I’d saved. From now on, I said, it would be our joint fund. We’d take on extra work after school and put everything we earned into a piggy bank. Lori would take it to New York and use it to get established, so that by the time I arrived, everything would be set.”(223) Lori and Jeannette work to earn money so they can leave. They named the piggy bank that they keep their money in Oz because New York City seems like The Emerald City to them. The two sisters went through so many struggles growing up they are determined to leave Welch and begin a new and better life. “ ‘I’ll never get out of here,’ Lori kept saying. ‘I’ll never get out of here.’ ‘You will,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’ I believed she would. Because I knew that if Lori never got out of Welch, neither would I.” (229). Lori and Jeannette have had a tough childhood and they need to escape Welch. They know that if they stay in Welch their life will always be full of challenges. New York is their escape from a life full of hardships and challenges. “I wondered if he was hoping that his favorite girl would come back, or if he was hoping that, unlike him, she would make it out for good.” (241). When Jeannette leaves her dad lost hope. He has always let his kids down and New York City is their escape. New York City represents their freedom. Their freedom from a life full of
Ever since she was a young girl. Jeannette had set high goals for herself. Since she was so advanced in school and genuinely enjoyed learning, it made sense that she would want to do big things with her life. Whether it was being a veterinarian or a geologist, her dreams extended far beyond her homes in little desert towns or Welch, West Virginia. However, because of her poverty-stricken home life, many people believed it didn’t seem likely that she would be so successful. One day, while living in Welch, Jeannette goes to the bar to drag her drunk father back home. A neighborhood man offers them a ride back to their house, and on the ride up he and Jeannette start a conversation about school. When Jeannette tells the man that she works so hard in school because of her dream careers, the man laughs saying, “for the daughter of the town drunk, you sure got big plans” (Walls 183). Immediately, Jeannette tells the man to stop the car and gets out, taking her father with her. This seems to be a defining moment in which Jeannette is first exposed to the idea that she is inferior to others. Although this man said what he did not mean to offend her, Jeannette is clearly very hurt by his comment. To the reader, it seems as if she had never thought that her family’s situation made her subordinate to those
Towards the middle of the memoir, the theme is shown through the irony of Jeannette’s mother’s situation as well as Jeannette’s feelings towards
Prose , Francine. "The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The Glass Castle':Outrageous Misfortune." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 13 Mar 2005. Web. 31 Jan 2011. .
Author Jeannette Walls, just like so many other Americans in the United States was deeply impacted by poverty. Poverty in the United States is not an uncommon occurrence and thousands of people in the United States are currently being raised well below the poverty line. Jeannette Walls in her memoir The Glass Castle was one child who was greatly impacted in a positive way due to the lessons and hope her parents were able to give her. This gave her perseverance, persistence and power to become the successful person she has become today.
Could the dysfunction of the Walls family have fostered the extraordinary resilience and strength of the three older siblings through a collaborative set of rites of passage? One could argue that the unusual and destructive behavior of the parents forced the children into a unique collection of rites of passage that resulted in surprisingly resilient and successful adults. In moving back to Welch, Virginia, the children lost what minimal sense of security they may have enjoyed while living in their grandmother’s home in Arizona. The culture and climate (both socially and environmentally) along with an increased awareness of their poverty resulted in a significant loss of identity. As they learned new social and survival skills in this desperate environment, there is a powerful sense of camaraderie between the older children. Their awareness, drive and cunning survival skills while living in Welch result in a developing sense of confidence in their ability to survive anything. This transition, while wretched, sets the stage for their ability to leave their environment behind with little concern for a lack of success. As the children leave, one by one, to New York, they continue to support one another, and emerge as capable, resourceful young adults.
Jeannette Walls was born into a poor family who often had to live homeless and without food. The environment in which she grew up in is what gave her the characteristics she possesses. One trait that describes Jeannette is that she is very adventurous. Since she was constantly exposed to new surroundings, she became curious of them. While she was homeless in the desert, she would play a game with her father called Monster Hunting. She grew to not be afraid of anything, since she could fight off these so called “monsters.” Also, Jeannette is very decisive. To get away from Welch, a poor town in West Virginia, she made sure that she would get enough money to move to New York. She did this by getting a job to save up money for a bus ticket and for college. Along with this, Jeannette is very ambitious. She worked very hard to get accepted into college by working for the school newspaper, since she wanted to become a journalist. On the other hand, Melba Patillo was born into a middle class family who lived in Lit...
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a harrowing and heartbreaking yet an inspiring memoir of a young girl named Jeannette who was deprived of her childhood by her dysfunctional and unorthodox parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Forced to grow up, Walls stumbled upon coping with of her impractical “free-spirited” mother and her intellectual but alcoholic father, which became her asylum from the real world, spinning her uncontrollably. Walls uses pathos, imagery, and narrative coherence to illustrate that sometimes one needs to go through the hardships of life in order to find the determination to become a better individual.